PHYLLOMANIA. 27 
place with the few favourites of the public; and the effect is, that 
plants which were seen in every garden, though their price was high, 
become extremely scarce, and finally disappear altogether. Fashion, in 
this as in other things, is never without a reason for adopting an inno- 
vation. The Cactuses, of which, at one time, ship-loads came to our 
shores, were discarded because they were such spiny, irritating things, 
and which, in public gardens, you were requested not to touch. The 
Aloes, now only seen in all their diversified forms in Prince Salm-Dyck’s 
magnificent works, had to make room for less interesting types, because 
you had to wait for a series of years before many of them flowered ; 
popular opinion declared it was sometimes a whole century. Such 
plants might be in their place in antediluvian times, when people as 
old as Methuselah were plentiful, but scarce fit garden-pets when 
human life seldom reaches fourscore years. Then came the reign of 
the Dahlias, a brilliant and prosperous one, but suddenly cut short by 
the startling discovery that they flowered late in the autumn, and were 
apt to be killed by the first night-frost. Last autumn, when enjoying 
the fine show of Chrysanthemums in the Temple Gardens, we trembled 
at the very thought that somebody who has a voice in the fashion of 
flowers should find some argument why this lovely sight should not be 
seen ; why the Chrysanthemum, with its marvellous variety of colour, 
much more the “ Pride of London ” than the little humble Saxifrage of 
that name, should be banished for some new, untried favourite, perhaps 
not half so well adapted to the smoky atmosphere of our capital. 
As long as one set of flowers is superseded by another, there is, 
perhaps, not much to complain of; but a fashion is gradually creeping 
in, well calculated to create alarm. Endeavours are now being made 
to persuade us that it is but a depraved taste to admire flowers at all ; 
that it is the foliage on which nature has lavished the greatest beauty, 
and that here real taste has proper objects for gratification. The Ferns 
were the first of this class of plants which gained a footing amongst us. 
The elegant and graceful tracery of their foliage was so bewitching that 
a perfect rage for them sprang up, and during the last ten years more 
books have been written about them than since botany became a 
science. The species indigenous to our islands have been illustrated 
in every imaginable manner; in bulky volumes, as in ‘ The British 
Ferns Nature-printed,’ and in portable companions, as in ‘ The British 
Ferns at One View.’ There is hardly a publishing house that has not 
